Warnings, disclaimers, etc.
A/N's - why does Hiei's magic look like sand in his mind? Because his mindscape is a desert. There's a lot of metaphorical imagery in a mindscape. More on mindscapes coming later.
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Ch. 25 - Blizzard Calling
Madam Pomfrey had not been happy at letting Hiei out of the Infirmary, but with the promise of his swift return, and several minutes where Dumbledore had spoken to her too quietly to hear, she'd given in. With conditions.
So Hiei had submitted to the indignity of letting Kuwabara tote him through the halls in Dumbledore's wake, the headmaster leading them in a winding route that managed to neatly avoid students and the more gossipy portraits alike. Genkai, Keiko, and Yukina followed silently, ending up in Dumbledore's office. At that point, Kuwabara plonked Hiei down on his own two feet and scooted several steps over to Yukina.
Dumbledore pretended not to notice, as he circled behind his desk and pushed several strange items aside. One remained on the blotter, and it took Hiei a minute to identify it as more than a pile of different metals.
The chain coiled on Dumbledore's desk was an eye-smarting riot of different links: smooth brass, rope-coil steel, braided copper, pockmarked iron. When he picked it up, it dangled from his hands and showed a wooden link on each end: one a loop of pale wood, the other a blackened square. "Your Portkey," he informed the little group, proffering it with an avuncular little smile.
Hiei eyed the heavy chain dubiously; no one else made a move to take it.
Unfazed, Dumbledore twisted the chain until he could reach the pale wooden loop on one end. "This one will take you to Rinns Point." The first point on their planned blizzard tracks, on the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides: as far southwest as you could get without going to Ireland or England. He dropped the link and added, "Simply say 'Islay'. The remaining links are activated by saying 'Track' and the number; 'One' for the brass links, 'Two' for the steel, 'Three' for the copper, and 'Four' for the iron. Each track is arranged in order, going eastward from Rinns Point. Merely keep track of which link you're touching as you travel. As for returning," Dumbledore picked up the wooden square on the far end, "'Home' brings you back here."
That sounded easy enough, Hiei thought.
Genkai took the chain from Dumbledore's hand, coiling it around her arm, and held up the wooden ring on the end. "Well?" she asked. They all scrambled to catch a finger in the loop, then Genkai announced, "Islay," and, with a sensation very much like someone had caught a hook behind Hiei's navel and pulled, the Headmaster and his office vanished.
Hiei landed hard on a grassy slope, brown and dry with winter grass, salt winds keening low against his face. Off to one side, a boulder broke Kuwabara's tumbled landing; Keiko smacked up against him with a sharp "oof!" Straight ahead, the land dropped steeply down to a narrow stretch of rocky beach, foamy white breakers rolling in from a slate-gray sea that faded into the cloudy sky.
A slow turn showed only a dirt path running jaggedly down to the beach, a lone sign stuck off-kilter into the ground next to it. Hiei couldn't see any buildings or roads from here, much less people.
"Good enough," he muttered. Even if the idea of being in his subconscious and unaware of the world around him, while he was out in the open, made his stomach feel a little tight. Knowing that his sister was going to be right there and in the same state...
Yukina slid up next to him, gaze fixed out to sea as well. "It'll all turn out all right," she murmured. It wasn't quite a question, not enough so for Hiei to do more than grunt something like an agreement. A tiny smile tugged at her lips, eyes as red as Hiei's own flicking to meet his. "Let's begin then, ne?"
One last look out to sea, then Hiei turned to where Kuwabara and Keiko had managed to sort themselves out. Keiko had Kuwabara settled back against the rock he'd fallen against.
"Ah, Yukina-chan, if you would..." Pink tinted Keiko's cheeks as she gestured to a patch of grass next to the boy, but Yukina knelt there as if she belonged curled against Kuwabara's side. "Thank you. Er. Now you, Hiei..." A spot next to Yukina, very self-preserving of the human girl; Hiei would not have been happy if she'd tried to put him next to Kuwabara. As he sat down warily where she asked, Keiko rallied, and said, "I'm not sure how to do this without knocking you all unconscious," hence the sitting, of course, "but I think that Yukina-chan should be able to come to, if only a little bit. I'd like you to at least try, okay?"
Yukina nodded.
"Okay. Now relax, please... let the rock take your weight, and if you'd all look at each other... three, two-" Her fingers pinched in the air between Hiei's face and theirs, and
Hiei's feet crunched in the sandy, cliffside basin overlooking the dry, darkened desert of his mind. The three moons in their empty sky had moved, the red one glaring balefully low in the sky, the white hovering even lower than that in the opposite direction, and the last, greenish one riding high and small overhead.
He wasn't entirely sure, but Hiei thought that he might've landed in a different place at the edge of the broad, flat sandy plain of his mind. The jagged hills in the distance had a slightly different line than he remembered. Turning, he found that the rocky outcropping at his back was nearly straight, a ledge some five meters high, rather than the sheltered little hollow from last time.
Automatically, he grabbed for his headband, fingers scraping against his smooth forehead. Right. No Jagan in here. That meant he'd have to find the connection without its help...
Surely he wouldn't have landed too far from the connection point? After all, there was no reason for Keiko to have put the connection in the same part of the mindscape as before. Who knew how a mental landscape translated to the real world, anyway?
The previous time, the link had been an arch of rock in the lower reaches of the mountains, between Hiei and the white moon. The white moon this time was off to his left, low enough that it was half-hidden by the mountains as it was. If he climbed up and found another arch...
That decided, Hiei leapt for the craggy heights. It didn't take long, skidding on flaking stone, before he found a fold in the cliffs cupping another sandy ledge. The expected archway was already backlit by the moon, the light coming from it not quite the same shade of pale as the rest of the moonlight, and was steaming gently.
Hiei slid down the gravel slope to land at the entrance, and blinked.
The archway into Yukina's glacial mindscape looked very much the same, with the thick snowdrifts nearest the threshold half-melted, pockmarked from meltwater trickling into the dusty rock on Hiei's side. However, set into the ice sheltering the hollow, another opening looked out onto sunny skies and the vibrant rooftops of skyscrapers. One rather horrifying billboard there was emblazoned with Kuwabara's face, his fierce grin underscored with a caption proclaiming that even the greatest heroes study hard for their friends.
A moment later, the human himself leapt into view. Hiei nearly choked, tearing his eyes away as fast as he could. Whoever invented spandex needed to be blasted into little tiny atoms, preferably with Kokuryuuha. Ugh. He was never going to be able to forget this.
"Yukina-chaaaaan!"
Had the snowpack been real, Hiei was fairly sure that Kuwabara's yell would've caused an avalanche.
"Yukina-chaaaaan!" the human yelled again, leaning in close to the cave entrance. The tip of his combed-up hair whitened with frost, and Hiei's gut clenched.
"Stay in your own mind, you idiot!" he snarled. Kuwabara jolted, automatically jerking back. Then his eyes flashed with recognition and narrowed, just as Hiei realized why he'd shouted in the first place.
Yukina's mind might not be as cold as the Glacier, but it very likely was. Just as Hiei's own was scorching from his fire affinities.
Kuwabara came back to himself with a sputter. "Who are you calling an idiot, you shrimpy pipsq-"
"The guy who almost froze his breath in his lungs," Hiei interrupted dryly.
"Wha..." Kuwabara made the connection between personality and mindscape faster than Hiei expected. And, predictably, he blew up. "YUKINA-CHAN IS A WARM AND CARING PERSON-"
"Whose soul is most comfortable in inhumanly icy wastes. Get over it."
Kuwabara sucked in a furious breath, then...
"Oniichan? Kazuma?"
Kuwabara spun, arms outflung (though, Hiei noticed, the human kept them carefully on his side of the link). "Yukina-chan!"
Yukina slid down the snowy bank at the edge of the hollow, bare feet crunching knee-deep into slush. "You look very heroic, Kazuma!" she said, beaming up at him. "I'm sorry I'm late," she added, including Hiei in her smile.
Hiei shrugged, looking away. "You're not late," he muttered, not entirely truthfully, then quickly changed the subject. "How do you want to do this?"
"Well..." Yukina frowned, hands clasping uncertainly before herself. "The power transfer wasn't a problem last time, I don't think... But as for waking up...?"
The previous time, Hiei and Yukina had woken by breaking the link. They could do that again, but the whole point was to keep the link intact so Hiei and Kuwabara's power could flow through for Yukina to use. That meant they'd have to do something else.
Kuwabara hummed deeply, a serious sound that caught Hiei's attention. Except that with the overdone pensive expression... the urge to say something cutting and mocking made Hiei's teeth clench. It would be too easy. It might make the idiot think that his remark the week before, about Hiei being a poor brother, had actually had some effect. It would definitely upset Yukina.
"So..." Kuwabara's eyes opened, and he peered past Yukina as if he could see through the blowing snow. "Which way is out?"
Hiei's eyes automatically flicked up to his blue-black sky.
Out.
Damn. The idiot might have hit on a working idea for once.
"Up," Hiei said, earning two startled looks.
"Up?" Yukina echoed blankly. "But we can't fly."
"You can't?" Kuwabara interrupted. "I did. Like Superman," he added.
Yukina wilted a bit. "I'm not sure I could be a superhero, Kazuma."
"Sure you can!" Kuwabara then seemed to mentally stumble, which didn't surprise Hiei a bit. "Er..."
"Try brooms." If they could get one, Hiei thought. But brooms weren't the only way to fly. "Wings. Tornados." Like Jin the Windmaster.
At that last, Yukina frowned slightly, gaze turning inward. She lifted a hand, pulling snowflakes from the glaciers above to drift in its wake, shaping themselves in vague streamers fanning from her fingertips. Slowly, she turned, the wind whistling to a higher, faster pitch. "I think..."
Hiei left her to it - she'd either figure out how to get out and conscious with the link intact, or they'd feed in as much power as they could and do this in shorter bursts - and turned to call up his own power.
A twist of will, and movement started far in the desert basin: unlike Yukina's waking winds, from the glacial mountains at the edges of her mind, Hiei's were starting near the core of his power, a dust devil spreading outwards until the entire basin was a rushing whirl of hot sand.
Now to send it to Yukina, hopefully without getting himself sandblasted like last time. A curl of his fingers brought a tendril of sand snaking out of the storm, winding around his arm like the Kokuryuuha before it slipped further up to nuzzle at his palm. Hiei cupped his free hand over the coiled sand and pulled his palm back slowly, spreading his fingers wide, the coil thickening obediently until it had to fall free from his arm. Now in both hands, spreading wider and wider, the sand grew to an appreciable size and continued past that- now as thick as a large dog, now a horse, now the Kokuryuuha, half as wide as the archway into Yukina's mind. The blunted tip of the sand puckered, small pockmarks like a serpentine face smiling at Hiei, and Hiei let it butt up against his hands again as he turned to face Yukina's mind once more.
His sister had given up on using winds while he'd been busy with his magic. She now sat perched on a floating shard of ice, blue-white and thick as his forearm. A swarm of tiny orange-and-blue toys flew in circles around her, colorful capes flapping and plastic muscles bulging.
Hiei very carefully didn't wince at the sight of hundreds of Kuwabara action figures, much less them swarming his sister, but he wasn't particularly careful about where he aimed when he sent the sand swirling through the link. And if the toys just happened to all get swamped - if a slight shudder of warmth went up Hiei's spine when the sand hit - if the toys all got knocked into the snow and sky, well, that was Kuwabara's fault for taking up so much space right in front of the links.
Yukina caught a few of the action figures, pulling them close as the others scuttled free of the snow and sand, then slid one cool, gentle hand over the coil of Hiei's power. "Thank you, Hiei-niisan," she said, smiling. Then she looked up into her clouded sky, and the ice shard rose swiftly out of sight, drawing both sand and swarm behind it.
So that was that.
Now they just had to wait, feeding magic slowly through the links, until Yukina had finished powering her storm. And then...
"Hey."
Hiei flicked a carefully incurious glance towards Kuwabara, meeting the man's eyes (instead of the awful costume) in contempt.
Kuwabara looked away quickly, crossing his arms and going an uncomfortable shade of red. "About the other week."
The other week... the only thing Hiei could think of that Kuwabara might be referring to, that would have Kuwabara looking like he was about to face Shizuru, was...
"You aren't a bad brother," Kuwabara bit out.
... that. Which was the last thing Hiei wanted to talk about. Ever. Even if the admission made a little cold knot somewhere in Hiei's chest loosen just the tiniest bit.
Kuwabara's eyes snapped back to Hiei's. "But you're still a stupid shrimp!" he added, fast and hard, like he thought Hiei might be feeling charitable towards him now.
Charitable. Hah.
Hiei turned sharply away from the link, and a moment later suppressed a wince. The move had put his back to Kuwabara... but the human wasn't going to understand what that meant, so it didn't matter. It only mattered that Kuwabara would drop the subject, so Hiei stared pointedly away into what could be seen of the sky above the swirling sands.
High above the barren desert, the smallest, greenish moon shifted. A thick, syrupy drop seeped from the bottom, oozing towards the ground until it vanished into the storm.
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Something started burning deep and low in Kurama's chest. Absently, he swallowed, letting his head rest heavier on his hand as he gazed out the tower window.
Heartburn, he thought to himself. He really had to be more careful what he ate at lunch.
Far over the western horizon, clouds began to gather.
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Late that night, in Gryffindor Tower, Harry sat curled in a chair he'd pulled up next to the window, watching ice pile up against the glass. On a normal day, or a moonlit night, he would have been able to see all the way to the railroad tracks and the forest beyond. As it was, he could only see the castle walls because of the blurred firelight in their windows.
Behind him, static flared on the Wizarding Wireless. Someone muttered a hex, and the radio cleared up, the Wassailing Witches giving way to wizarding news.
... Ministry has suspended all train service north of Hadrian's Wall. All wizards are advised not to owl or travel to, within, or past the borders region, except in the case of medical emergency. The Ministry warns that anyone Flooing to St. Mungo's from Scotland without a medical emergency will face charges...
Another hex, and the radio returned to a low alto crooning Silver Spells.
"Hey! I was listening to that!" someone snapped.
"And we were listening to music!" came the sharp reply. "Get your own wireless!"
Harry tried to tune it out as the jinxes began to fly. Who cared what was playing on the stupid radio, anyway? The train was supposed to come tomorrow. Harry was supposed to spend Christmas with Sirius... with family, with people who loved him.
Somehow, he didn't think it was going to happen.
He shoved out of the chair and stormed upstairs, away from the noise. The dorm was, fortunately, empty; Harry wasn't sure what he would have done if it wasn't. Had a fight, probably.
Shoes kicked under the bed, outer robe tossed on his trunk - which had been almost completely packed for the past two days - wand under his pillow...
Pain lanced hot through Harry's scar, and the world went black.
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TBC
A/N's -
- Kuwabara is startled at the idea that up = out because he can fly in his mindscape. The sky isn't a limit for him.